About Wonga Finance South Africa

Website

Address

33 Bree Street, Cape Town

Company Size

201-500

Summary

Wonga Finance South Africa (Wonga) is a FinTech business providing unsecured credit solutions to people in South Africa. Wonga was founded in 2007 in the UK by two South African entrepreneurs in response to the needs of under-served banked customers. Wonga intended to disrupt what the banking industry offered, and succeeded.

Wonga has funded over 2.5million loans to South Africans since its launch…and counting!

Apart from offering short-term credit solutions, we focus on growing the level of financial confidence in South Africa via an inclusive learning portal called The Money Academy. By helping South Africans become more financially literate, Wonga believes that rather than simply being a vendor of credit products, it is helping people own their possibilities. Whilst we are proud of our pioneering roots, we always put our customers at the centre of our business. We support responsible lending and align ourselves firmly with the regulations set out in the National Credit Act.

At Wonga, we love tech and we believe in the ability of tech to be a differentiator in the market. We believe that we have great tech potential, where every developer is encouraged to focus on self-improvement and we are always actively looking for new or improved ways to develop cutting edge systems. We currently have developers exploring the use of various technologies such as F#, Event Sourcing, RabbitMQ, CI technologies, Automation, etc. We pride ourselves on always looking at what’s happening in the industry and adopting new tech as and when it’s appropriate.

We see team culture as one of the most important aspects of moving our technology platforms forward. We place heavy emphasis on creating an environment where experimentation and learning are encouraged. The team socialises often and has a strong cohesion in which they support each other.

Unique skills are incredibly important to our team, so encouraging growth continued learning and respecting skill sets is the way we work. We have weekly sessions where talks are presented, followed by discussions, with the intent to explore new ideas and foster an environment where everyone contributes to the growth of our technology platform.

We are completely agile and use Scrum as the main methodology. We are predominantly a .Net based company with an overarching micro-services architecture. All our service communicate strictly via HTTP, with C# applications working behind it. We use Queuing technology to ensure reliability and are currently using SQL Server as our data store. We have put a heavy emphasis on CI, with smooth Jenkins, Octopus pipelines and git versioning to manage releases.